


the story is only a tragedy if the god loves you back

by astrid_fischer



Category: The Wicked + The Divine
Genre: Canon Era, Canonical Character Death, F/M, listen i think we all knew to some extent this was inevitable
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-23
Updated: 2017-02-23
Packaged: 2018-09-26 12:46:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9897239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrid_fischer/pseuds/astrid_fischer
Summary: He only has the one photo of her.Not one of her performing, even though she’s amazing performing. But she’s always amazing. He doesn’t need a photo like that, even if she would let him take one -- the ones her more daring fans try to take, drunk on the shadows of the underground and the pale of her eyes.





	

**Author's Note:**

> after issue 23 (kevin wada's fashion magazine issue) came out, i wanted to know what in-universe explanation there could be for the fashion 'photos' of the morrigan. my friend suggested that she must have granted him permission to take them. i ran with it.
> 
> *title from this poem by nathaniel orion g.k., from tumblr: http://nathanielorion.tumblr.com/post/154728845928/falling-in-love-with-a-god-is-not-a-death

He only has the one photo of her.

Not one of her performing, even though she’s amazing performing. But she’s always amazing. He doesn’t need a photo like that, even if she would let him take one -- the ones her more daring fans try to take, drunk on the shadows of the underground and the pale of her eyes.

They’re much too presumptuous, the ecstatic teenagers in black nail varnish and fishnets, too presumptuous by half; lifting phone cameras up to try and snap a blurry flashless photo they can’t wait to post to Instagram when they get home at three in the morning, smelling like cigarette smoke and earth.

Everyone who takes the risk gambles badly, thinking they’ll be the one in ten, thinking it’s an urban legend, thinking anything but the truth:

That when they fall into bed exhausted but wired and scroll through their pictures from the night, they’ll see a photo they didn’t take in between the group selfie at the pub up the block and the hasty snap of the profane graffiti on the steps of Victoria station.

It’s always different, because of course it would be: a hospital, a bedroom, a kitchen floor. Your home. A place you’ve never been. The road. The woods. The sea. The wreckage of a car, or a fire, or sometimes no hint at all -- nothing to prepare for, nothing to warn against the worst day of your life.

Maybe you know the person. Maybe you just had your first date. Maybe you’ve been married for fifteen years. Maybe you won’t meet for another four.

It doesn’t matter who they are; in the photo you didn’t take, they’re always dead.

There are online photo blogs and communities dedicated to posting those pictures, analyzing and obsessing over them, networks desperately trying to find the people in them. All of which Baphomet finds a bit morbid -- though he guesses, really, he’s one to talk.

He doesn’t have a photo of the two of them, either.

He has dozens of photos of not-them, of them before: Cameron and Marian, not Baphomet and Morrigan. B.C., not A.D. Pre-concert selfies, mostly, all done up in black and eyeliner. Playing roles without realizing. A grade-school level exercise in foreshadowing and dramatic irony.

It’s not the same.

_ He _ gave  _ her _ a photo, a few weeks back, taken half-jokingly on a fan’s snatched Polaroid when he had just come offstage, shirtless and grinning and covered in sweat because for all its merits leather really didn’t  _ breathe _ , and he’d had to peel the damned jacket off and what felt like half his skin with it.

Privately, he wasn’t sure if she’d want the photo. If she’d give him a look of cool mocking and hand it back, or slide between aspects without warning and tear it to shreds with steely crows’ teeth, snarling curses at him.

He didn’t always know the Morrigan the way he’d known Marian, even though he acted like he did. Maybe by acting like he did, he made it true. Who knew. Point was, he was never sure of her. But he gave it to her like he knew she’d want it, and whatever the reason, it seemed like she had.

Whatever the reason, she didn’t throw it away. She kept it.

That was less than a month ago. He’s had the photo of her for almost a year.

No one knows the loophole to the nine out of ten rule, because it wouldn’t matter anyway: you  _ can  _ take a photo of the Morrigan, and live on unpunished, so long as she gives you permission.

The morning he took the photo was two days after he’d become a god.

Two days since not-Marian-but-still-Marian had shown up at his window. Two days since she’d asked him to fall with her. Two days since, knowing the consequences, he had.

They were in bed, and it was early so she was still sleeping. She was more Marian when she slept than Morrigan, beautiful and pale without her grease paint war paint, hair a dark tangle and covers slipping down her bare shoulders.

It was still a little unsettling, if he was honest. Cameron had woken up with her like this a hundred times in a different life, in a room that probably wasn’t more than a square mile away from them in the city above. But Baphomet hadn’t. It was different now. Everything was different now.

He was sitting up against the headboard next to her with the sheets tangled around his waist, trying to download a bootleg of the latest Captain America movie to his phone using the shitty service in the underground, when a Twitter notification popped up cheerfully:

_ @amaterasuwu, @wondalandrecordsUK, @baalallday, and 500 others are Tweeting about: #RIPLuci. _

He glanced over automatically to see if the cheerful chiming sound had woken the Morrigan, but it hadn’t.

He knew Lucifer was dead. He knew the Morrigan had tried to save her. Knew she’d failed. She wasn’t talking about it, and he wasn’t asking. There was TV footage bouncing around all over the online stratosphere, but he hadn’t watched it.

It had only happened yesterday. Some people were kind, in online memoriam. Some people weren’t.

A lot of them posted photos: Lucifer had encouraged them at her shows, so they popped up by the thousands. Ecstatic selfies in line for a show. Glamour spreads from magazines. Out-of-focus stage shots from meters away, her drenched in the red of her favorite lighting cue. Photos of her in last night’s clothes out on the street, laughing and flipping off the camera with her hair in disarray and white heels dangling from one hand.

Baphomet hadn’t even met her, of all the Underworldly ironies -- there hadn’t been time -- although he’d obviously known  _ of  _ her, well before he was ever a god.

So he couldn’t pretend the sudden knot in his chest, seeing the outpouring of anonymous tributes in 140 characters or less, was down to grief. He wasn’t noble enough for that. No, it was fear, pure and simple. He didn’t want to die.

The thought crept into his head, sunk claws in, and wouldn’t leave: all they had was two years, and she hadn’t even made it that far.The panic that seized him at the thought was immediate, and inexplicable.

It had been happening a lot more than he had expected it would. Fear of mortality, that was.

He’d made this deal, he’d  _ chosen  _ this, because he wanted power more than anything and he wanted Marian even more than that. He’d thought he was prepared for the consequences.

(She’d asked and he’d fallen, and it wasn’t fair to blame her for that but nothing about this was fair, so he did anyway.)

It was fucking stupid, because he already got to be here with her and go to sleep with her and wake up with her and he’d be an idiot to ask for anything else on top of it. It was a privilege he would kill for, hypothetically, and die for, literally.

But he didn’t have a photo of her. And somehow, having realized it, he couldn’t stand it.

It shouldn’t matter. A photo wouldn’t save his soul or save her life. It wouldn’t change anything.

But still, the fixation was singular and unshakable. He knew without knowing how that this one stupid thing was the  _ only  _ thing that would make the panic stop.

“Marian,” he murmured, and her pale eyes opened, took a moment to focus on him.

She didn’t always respond to the name. Whether it was to punish him for using it, or because she truly didn’t acknowledge it as hers anymore, he wasn’t sure and wouldn’t ask.

She was much more likely to in the mornings, in that hazy dream state between sleeping and waking when she was more girl and less goddess.

She asked the obvious question wordlessly, sleepily, one dark brow pulling up in a curious arch. He could practically hear the pretentious pseudo-Shakespearean-whatever:  _ What is it? Why are you waking Mistress Morrigan before the appointed hour? _

He held up his phone and mimed snapping a photo. “Can I?” he asked quietly.

The Morrigan rarely looked surprised. She looked surprised now, he thought. Like he’d done something she hadn’t expected of him, and couldn’t tell if that was welcome or not.

After a long pause, she nodded. He expected her to sit up, to fix her makeup, to pose regally. He assumed the  _ yes  _ was conditional, and he had already accepted any condition she might give him.

But she just lay there, curled up in the blankets and watching him with half-lidded eyes, expression soft and very far, in that moment, from the untouchable queen of the underground done up in black lace and laces.

(It didn’t matter. She was still, always, the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.)

Even with permission granted, he hesitated once he had the camera focused on her. He stared at her image on the screen, a study in black and white and shadowy greys, watching the faint rise and fall of her chest with her breathing. His thumb hovered over the capture button.

What if the vague hand-wavey bullshit magic that dictated the pictures didn’t work? What if permission wasn’t enough?

What if, just for one photo, he had to see the Morrigan die?

“You won’t,” she said quietly, reading him the way she always had and always could.

He was startled at first more by the words themselves than their content -- he’d already learned it was rare for the goddess to slip out of her grandiose third person narrative to address him directly. She was still watching him as she said, “You are the exception. You are always the exception.”

She didn’t say it like she was happy about it, or like she wasn’t. More like it was a fact, inarguable, something boring and categorizable about him to file next to the color of his eyes or his (former) middle name.

She said it, and he believed her, because he had to. He took the photo.

He had to dare himself to look at it, like he was seven years old. Squeezed his eyes shut tight, then opened them again, before he did.

It was a photo of her, lying tangled in sheets and shadows, just like he’d taken. He felt almost weak with relief, suddenly.

She rolled over onto her other side, away from him and the unwelcome LED light of the phone’s screen. “If that photograph appears on the Internet, the underground’s triple-queen  _ will _ seek terrible retribution,” drifted over her shoulder. The menace of the words was somewhat lessened by the fact that they ended in a yawn.

He couldn’t help his smile, in the dark. He leaned down and pressed a kiss to her bare shoulder, and she made a sleepy sound of acknowledgment, like a  _ tsk  _ only fonder.

He only has the one photo of her, but it’s more than enough.


End file.
